Recap: 'Terra Nova' - 'What Remains'

It takes a special talent to make a show about people going through a wormhole to dinosaur-infested prehistoric times inside an alternate time stream…and then make it this spectacularly dull. I almost want to applaud the show’s writers for achieving something I didn’t dream was possible. There’s a lot of talent behind the scenes on “Terra Nova” that came from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Had tonight’s plot showed up intact with the crew of the Enterprise standing in for our prehistoric heroes, no one would have blinked an eye. It would have been perfectly of a piece with that show. Here’s the difference: “TNG” would have at least known to tell this episode in its third season, not as its third overall offering.

After all, where’s the fun in watching several core characters lose their memories/personalities if we barely know them at all in the first place? Having Picard temporarily lose his mind after a few seasons of watching him kick intergalactic butt would have been great.* “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” once took tonight’s basic premise and spun it into a fun hour. But “Tabula Rasa” also came after five-plus seasons of deep character development, making their blank slate personalities both a treat but also an examination of some latent psychological impulses that rounded out their characters. But what do we really know about The Shannons? About Taylor? About Malcolm (in the Middle)? Nearly nothing, which speaks to either a miscalculation on the part of the writers to try this so early in the series’ run, or a scarier reality: this show spent so long on the pilot that they forgot to plan a series.

* Not being remotely encyclopedic in my “TNG” knowledge, I’m willing to wager such an episode exists, and that it was much better than tonight’s episode of “Terra Nova.”

In terms of long-term planning, there’s a little bit involving everyone’s favorite teenager, Josh. His plan to retrieve Kara from the future on the next pilgrimage to Terra Nova gets him involved with a member of the colony who has secret ties to the Sixers. But the majority of the hour was spent in a cave that makes its inhabitants mentally regress to an earlier point in their lives before ultimately going catatonic. And yes, in case you’re wondering: I did check for donkey wheels and purple energy inside the cave, especially with Jim serving as a wanna-be Constant for his wife Elisabeth. But whereas “Lost” solved its time-tripping hero Desmond’s mental unmooring with an epic, seasons-in-the-making phone call, “Terra Nova” solved its central problem with magic mucus. I wish I were kidding.

The producers of “Terra Nova” have gone on record as saying that if the Shannons didn’t work on an emotional level, then the show would ultimately fail. That’s a sadly accurate prophecy. I appreciate their desire to focus on the humans in the show rather than the animals, since that fully fits in with the type of television program I want to watch. But this is a B-movie that thinks it’s a serious drama. So much of an audience’s involvement lies in trusting the creators of the show to understand what they are actually producing. Any dissonance between what those creators say the show is and what actually appears onscreen gives any sane person pause while watching it. What little joy in tonight’s episode comes from the “silly” aspects the show would rather play down. Taylor seeing a brontosaurus and thinking it’s part of a hallucination is ridiculous, but it’s the right kind of ridiculous that “Terra Nova” needs to embrace in order to get out of its current rut. The show needs someone to point out not only how ridiculous this all is, but how ridiculously awesome it COULD be if everyone just stopped and smelled the prehistoric equivalent of roses.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment here: did this show need to go back 85 million years to tell the types of tales it’s currently spinning? I honestly don’t think so. You would never know these teenagers were living in the past, given their everyday goal of simply getting to first base with their respective love interests. Sure, the pseudoscience of the past two episodes has served to give the show a semblance of plot, but it’s nothing that couldn’t have also been accomplished in the dystopian future depicted in the pilot. “Jurassic Park” at least gave ample time to make that dangerous landscape wondrous for a time before unleashing hell. “Terra Nova” isn’t wondrous or dangerous. It’s mostly just ponderous.

So we have a show that doesn’t embrace the inherent coolness of its concept, and doesn’t have the skill to draw a three-dimensional family within those drab confines. If the Shannons actually spent five minutes together each episode, maybe we’d learn what these people have to lose. But the names on Elisabeth’s note cards serve as a literal representation of the biggest problem with tonight’s memory loss: it’s a shorthand trick to avoid doing real, hard character work. Rather than slow build up the Shannons’ affection for each other, or Taylor’s tragic past with his wife, the show just dumps heaps of exposition upon us thanks to the power of convenient mental regression. Taylor nearly killing himself rather than remember his wife’s death would have been a powerful moment in a few months’ time, especially if hints of her fate got sprinkled through various episodes. But tonight, his near suicide didn’t seem shocking so much as sudden. Without given time to properly invest, the audience can’t properly react.

Other thoughts about tonight’s episode…

*** Thank God Outpost 3 had a sign on the outside that said “Outpost 3.” Otherwise the Sixers would mistake it for Terra Wal*Mart, I suppose.

*** Somewhere along the way, “family drama” started to equal “stupid drama” in the industry. Please. There’s more intelligence in a single scene of “Phineas and Ferb” than has been on display in any episode of “Terra Nova” to date. Families are smart. They want to figure it out together. Having Jim sneeze every eight seconds isn’t doing anyone any favors.

*** Between this episode and last Friday’s “Fringe,” it’s a banner week for protagonists hanging around infected areas without masks on. It’s also a banner week for me writing down in-show notes that say “PUT YOUR #@^&#ING MASK ON!”

*** I’m super pleased everyone’s favorite character Josh will be the catalyst for the Sixers undermining things. The show really tuned his behavior down last week, which gave me hope they hated him in the pilot as much as the audience did. But apparently “Terra Nova” insists on making his loins the lynchpin for all that will unfold in the following weeks.

*** It makes sense that Taylor would go all Colonel Kurtz once infected. After all, I had been muttering, “The horror….the horror…” throughout most of the hour.

*** There were enough intriguing facts about the future (the brutal winter in Detroit, the Somalian war rife with psy-ops) that I can’t help but feel that 1) the show picked the wrong permanent setting for the show, and 2) we better get some flashbacks to their characters’ past/history’s future to contextualize things. I’d rather watch people trying to survive in the future than mope in the past.

What did you think of tonight’s episode? Am I being too hard on the show, or does this feel like a massive miscalculation to you as well? Does the show’s prehistoric setting inherently limit the stories it can tell, or is it just that these early stories simply haven’t been that strong? Sound off below!

Well I agree about this being a pretty terrible episode, but so was the 3rd episode of TNG. (it was unbelievably racist and sexist, in my opinion, and others) that would give me hope that the good actors and some of the writers involved will be able to raise the bar, but shows don't get a season and a half to really find themselves like they did 25 years ago when TNG started.

You are spot on. The whole thing seems so amateurish - which is surprising given the behind the scenes talent tied to it. How do you make a show with great potential subject matter sooo boring? Heck, Land of the Lost (the show not the movie) was more interesting than Terra Nova!

yeah this show is pretty awful. i have better ways to spend an hour - and if it's going to be watching tv then Breaking Bad or netflix-ing The Wire are much better options than this mind numbing terra nova mess.

LOST was well written and interesting. Terra Nova is not. There has not been a show as good as LOST since LOST - Fringe comes closest. This show is like a generic version of Beastmaster or Xena. I honestly have no idea what people see in this show. Would you like to explain why you think this is the best show since LOST Jeff? LOST was great - this show is not even close.

After watching the episode my wife said, "This show has all the frustration of LOST with none of the people I care about." The only characters on Terra Nova that are remotely interesting aren't part of the Shannon Family. The one guy who was interesting, Taylor, just had his whole backstory wasted in one episode. Braga fails again.

LOST had a two hour pilot as well, but within those two hours we learned something intriguing about a whole bunch of characters.

This may be crazy-talk, and it is indeed the mootest of points, but this show really would be so much better if there was marital tension between the Shannons. It is totally inexcusable to use a memory loss episode this early in a show's run(although the run will most likely be so short that the creators were probably thinking, "Let's get what we think are our good ideas out as quickly as possible"), but if there was a rift between them, Elisabeth's temporary forgetting of Jim's existence could have been used successfully as a tool to accelerate the renaissance of their relationship. Also, Malcolm would have been an actual threat, especially if (and this is another moot fantasy) Jim were to have arrived, say, 180 days after his family, like Taylor's original co-pilgrims. This would have left them unsure if he was coming at all, which could have produced additional complicated family dynamics. It's frustrating because the three sentence pitch of this show sounds so promising, and they wouldn't have to change that much to pull it off, but they've done what they've done and for a show with purported mythos like this it's now too late. I'll still watch, and hopefully enjoy it, but it seems like it won't be more than for the same reason that I went to see Drive Angry in the theater by myself. In fact the only play show might have would be to make it into a network tv version of an intentional Grindhouse flick. Maybe a different dino could kill Josh every week only for him to be totally fine and ready to be entertainingly eaten, maimed, or crushed for the next episode. All the women could wear cloth bikinis. They could even have dinosaurs step in for some housework, Flinstones style. Instead we have Eureka with Carnotaurs. Oh well, it's a living. Is anyone else starting to wish ABC had picked up FlashForward for a second season?

Also, Levi, in the original version of the pilot, there WAS tension in the Shannon marriage - tons of it. They had the third baby as a hail Mary to try to save their relationship, they were cold to each other upon getting to Terra Nova, Josh was acting out mainly because he was frustrated with his parents fighting (and not because he was a whiny brat), etc. MUCH more interesting that way. But then I'm assuming the focus groups didn't like that and wanted a happier (read: boring) couple at the center of this, and all the potential drama got sucked away.

Hey Alan. I've heard you and Dan talking about this on your podcast and its dumbfounding why they would make a decision to remove tension. It's story-telling 101 really. Homeland is an example of a new show that uses the complications between a father and the family he's been separated from for years so successfully, it really is such a missed opportunity here. When you and Dan were talking about it I was wondering why you were so adamant about the pilot going down in quality, and now I understand completely. I don't think this show would have automatically been great if they had only made that small change, there are still so many other glaring mistakes, but it would still have been an improvement on almost every level.

The problem is they have invested in a network primetime show about dinosaurs. That is inherently flawed, because to make a show about dinosaurs and do it right (to today's audience standards) you need a budget that network TV can't supply.

So what the producers did is focus on the family and citizens of Terra Nova. BUT THEY AREN'T INTERESTING, especially compared to the setting they are placed in! I mean, you wanna talk Star Trek: TNG producers and what they can do, let's look at their comrade Ron D. Moore, the brains behind Battlestar Galactica: he created a show in a fantastical sci-fi setting, but rather than have it be a battle-of-the-week action show, he invested in great actors and powerful writing, while still doing enough FX to keep it popping (there was a gunfight or space battle every 4 episodes or so, not counting the clumps in multi-episode story arcs). BSG is the kind of show Terra Nova SHOULD be, but instead it feels like a lukewarm SyFy channel Saturday night original movie.

It's too late to replace the actors, sure. But they could spend more time establishing the characters and giving them deeper layers than "the teens are horny", "mom's married to her job", "dad wants to go on missions". I want to see them delve into each character's backstory (FLASHBACKS WORK!) and give them some neuroses that we can explore over a period of time. Maybe dedicate entire episodes to 1 character or 1 problem, rather than force every character and plot point to be serviced every episode. They could also throw in more dinosaurs, actually SHOW the danger Terra Nova is really in (like last week's episode with the pigeon-dino's, only with some breed that is less lame).

Anyway, if/when this show fails, it's going to fail because it had great potential and a terrific idea but a horrible, mismanaged execution.

Would have been nice if Fox schedules a re-run of the Oct 10 episode which got knocked off the air by the baseball game. The delayed run was intolerable because of the deluge of commercials squeezed in that had been pre-empted by the baseball game - but shown at the e3xpense of the terra nova episode.

I just keep thinking "Swiss Family Robinson" every time I watch "Terra Nova." Don't know why. I actually like "Swiss Family Robinson." Then again, I've also been comparing it to "Earth 2."Frankly, Earth 2 was also better.Keeping my fingers crossed that it will get better a few more episodes in...

I just keep thinking "Swiss Family Robinson" every time I watch "Terra Nova." Don't know why. I actually like "Swiss Family Robinson." Then again, I've also been comparing it to "Earth 2."Frankly, Earth 2 was also better.Keeping my fingers crossed that it will get better a few more episodes in...

I just keep thinking "Swiss Family Robinson" every time I watch "Terra Nova." Don't know why. I actually like "Swiss Family Robinson." Then again, I've also been comparing it to "Earth 2."Frankly, Earth 2 was also better.Keeping my fingers crossed that it will get better a few more episodes in...

Yeah, it flat out sucks. While it's true that TNG's first season was also pretty awful, TNG had three huge things going for it - it had a built-in fan base that was going to watch just about anything Star Trek related; it had Patrick Stewart who was pretty kick-ass from the very beginning; and it debuted during a TV era that hadn't be exposed to the likes of BSG or heck, even Babylon 5 or DS9.

Sci-fi shows have a lot more to live up to now (IMHO), and Terra Nova isn't living up to any standards.

Ryan, unlike your Fringe reviews I agree completely with your assessment. Terra Nova has been a giant series of expensive miscalculations.

With two essentially "bottle" episodes in a row, a lack of dinosaurs and an extreme lack of character development this could be the one of the worst example of "show, don't tell," in recent memory.

It seems like the production team decided that they had "nailed" the introduction of their core characters and fleshed out the universe in which they reside. These last two episodes seem to be from a production that is content to pump a string a standalone episodes that hinge on the chemistry of its cast.

Well, to be honest, TNG had "everyone is acting crazy because of a virus" story in, I kid you not, episode 2. Not amnesia, but not far either.

While we're in the subject of Trek... I'm not a hater, but I do not understand how someone could put Brannon Braga in charge of this. That man is a walking catastrophe to any TV show he's attached to, and that's not an exaggeration. On Voyager, he was infamous exactly for this very type of hyped, bland, toothless and moribund storytelling.

Of all the talented people in the industry, who on Earth handed him the keys to one the biggest projects in TV history?

spot on, as usual. I came to this show so excited... and now there's none of the elements that I hoped I'd find here : personnalities (need I list here all LOST so well-defined characters ?), mysteries (where's the mythology?????) and most of all ONE UNIQIUE STRONG STORY ARC divided in episodes, to bind it all. found none of it.

One of the great things about Lost was that you never knew who was going to die next. Main characters whatever you never knew who was going to explode, drown, get sucked into the plane's engine etc next. But in the intro to Terra Nova they have a bunch of nasty fast dinos surrounding a bunch of fairly dumb teenagers and apparently the dinos are completely unable to kill even one of them no matter how stupidly the teenagers act. If the producers aren't prepared to lose even one extremely minor character that we don't have any connection to yet, then this series is set to be extremely boring and unsuspenseful.

oh, man.. Ryan. You really dont like this show.. if it doesnt improve are you going to still post your suffering weekly until the end, or are you allowed to just give up ? Alan, sometimes gives a show he considers not worth the time, a few eps and then drops it until a season final post or a cancellation post.